I have used it a couple of times for stills, but because I am mainly doing animations it is more time-efficient for me to export the data and render with other rendering engines in a 3D package where I combine the meshes and particles with other elements of the project.

I use it from time to time. Mainly for previews, but also stills. For animations I normally switch over to my host app or Maxwell Studio, but did some animations in RF as well. Would be nice to have a Maxwell material editor in RF though...

Thomas, yes it would be good (to have the Maxwell Material Editor in Realflow). Is there a source of info you would recommend about Maxwell integration? I've been experimenting with RF animation in Maxwell Studio, and not have many successes?

Forester wrote:Is there a source of info you would recommend about Maxwell integration? I've been experimenting with RF animation in Maxwell Studio, and not have many successes?

AKAIK the Maxwell manual is more or less the only source - unfortunately. The problem with RF-Maxwell integration is that it requires a lot of manual work or scripting, but the Python wrap in Maxwell is partially incomplete and not really intuitive. Another issue is that RF's ABC files are not 100% supported by Maxwell. With particle files, for example, Maxwell says that they don't have any geometry inside. So, the only reliable way is to use BIN and RPC files. And once you've managed to get everything into Maxwell you have trouble to render channels like velocity or age. Maxwell Studio is also very, very, very slow with RF files that it almost hurts. And finally volumetrics: they're super slow to render and require huge amounts of memory. All in all, Maxwell's memory footprint is pretty high. When I think of Clarisse here... Billions of polygons are displayed in no time with just a handful of GB - but rendering in Clarisse is even slower than with Maxwell Would be great to have the best of both worlds.

It's really a shame why products from the same company don't work together on a higher level, because Maxwell's quality and particle replicating methods ("MultiPoint") are definitely very good.